CCIC-SJ Sermons

This message addresses the Lordship and stewardship of Christ in our lives.  If God is your Master, you will store up treasures in heaven, and if money is your master, you will store up treasures on earth.  If we cannot see rightly about money, then we will not be able to see spiritual things, but we will be spiritually blind.  The kind of treasure we store up indicates who our master is.  You can have only one master.  You will serve either God or money, love one and hate the other, and be devoted to one and despise the other.  Jesus issues an ultimatum to us to choose between God and money and as a result, either earthly treasures that have only temporal value or treasures in heaven that have eternal value for God.

So much can happen in a year.  In January 2021, on Episode 39 of our "God is Faithful"

podcast series, Dinah Chin shared a testimony on how privileged she was to participate

in God's amazing plan to serve and care for others.  This time, Dinah shares another

powerful and inspiring testimony of trusting in the Lord as she went through a year of

battling cancer.

 

Dinah's faith, positive attitude, humbleness and sense of humor permeates her

narrative as she gives credit to the Lord for providing for her spiritual, emotional,

mental and physical needs. God is truly faithful!

Christians are known to be people who pray. We pray before meals, we pray before meetings, we pray at our worship services. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches us how to pray through a well-known passage known to Christianas far and wide as "The Lord's Prayer." As we break down how as Christians we are supposed to pray we see that through this passage Jesus teaches us why we are supposed to pray, that is to grow deeper in our relationship with God.

Great acting makes great entertainment.  Great artists can lead the viewers into their roles and into their realms.  But in real life, great acting can be dangerous.  Look at the many ways people try to scam us, gaining our trust only to steal from us, to use us, and sadly to abuse us.  This world needs people to be open, transparent and honest.  How we wish people would stop lying and deceiving.  The ancient Greeks had an interesting word for "actors" = "hypocrites."  In Matthew 6:-8, 16-18, Jesus warned against those who "play church" or "play spiritual" in order to gain praise or other benefits instead of being wholeheartedly devoted to God.  He challenged us to look deeper than the actions, to look inside to our motives, why we do what we do.  Let's take this time to look at the scripture and then look into the mirror.

Whether we're young or old, we all face situations where it's difficult to love people. Sometimes people seriously wrong us, annoy us, or just disagree with us and we find it easy to harbor anger and resentment towards them. We want to take revenge and right every wrong on our own. But Jesus teaches us a different way to respond in Matthew 5:38-48. He teaches us to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. In this message, we learn three principles of why and how we can love others, even when it's difficult.

Lust is topic that is often very difficult to talk about and discuss. It's a sin that, while obvious, somehow sneaks into our lives. In this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus demonstrates for us that the fundamental problem of lust lies with how we look at other people. He invites us to be transformed by his Gospel in order that we might begin to look at others in a way that does not lead us into the temptation of lust.

Anger is something that many people struggle with. You see it in the news. You see it on social media. Perhaps more so during the pandemic, we see it in our own lives. In this part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that as citizens of his kingdom and his disciples, we must tame the problem of anger by the transforming power of the Gospel. In doing so, we begin to reshape the world around us as salt and light.

In Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus makes the bold claim of being the fulfillment of the Old Testament, which center on the coming of a perfect king who is also a teacher. The Scriptures will endure until all it says is accomplished, and we are to pay attention to all of it, including its smallest details. This does not mean that we should become like the scribes and Pharisees, but that we should seek from the Lord a greater, authentic righteousness that is rooted in a restored relationship with God the Father.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus spoke to people living under an oppressive foreign government, divided religious leaders, and weary of living as slaves or subjects to for the preceding 600 years.  He wanted to show them freedom in a dimension many had forgotten:  spiritual freedom from sin, which would help them live in whatever circumstances they were facing. 

 

Regardless of whether we talk about people living two thousand years ago or today, understanding our identity is essential to understanding how we will live. In this message, we will look at our being salt and light are integral to being God's children. Knowing these identities will help us navigate the many stresses and changes we face.

People often mistake Jesus for some mild-mannered teacher who gave benign messages about being good to one another.  That could not be further from the truth.  In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Jesus challenged His listeners to follow Him with all their heart, soul, mind and strength, and He showed them how God expected them to go well beyond the religiosity of their day.  This is the first of fourteen messages on the Sermon on the Mount, and we will begin with Jesus' opening remarks, often called The Beatitudes.  These are a collection of 9 blessings that God develops in every believer, and we will cluster them under three overarching  "attitudes:"  Being emptied of yourself, Being filled with the Holy Spirit, and Being ready for hard work. 

 

Open your Bible and join in for the ride!